The Chia coin, often dubbed Green Bitcoin, is a project that promised to be a green alternative to all of the previous attempts at creating a coin that can be mined. Using the Proof of Space (PoS) technique requires massive storage space and Chia plotting can destroy modern SSDs in a matter of weeks. However, the green disputes have been questioned widely, and the Chia coin is not considered so much of a green alternative anymore. From its peak of $1645, it has tumbled down by over 80% of that and it is now worth around $281 at the time of writing.

As these prices have declined a lot, miners are starting to look away from the coin and have started to resell their hardware. This massive SSD and HDD reselling has started to obtain new funds for miners to move to another alternative cryptocurrency. In the awe of this, some miners are rebranding their worn-out and used SSDs as brand new, and selling them in China advertising new conditions. As Chia plotting tends to destroy SSDs, it is only a matter of time before these "brand new" drives start failing. After China, we could see other markets flooded with these drives as well, so it is always best to be cautious with your purchase.

A new cryptocurrency going by the name of Chia could bring about a boom in demand for HDD and SSD, which have been kept relatively untouched by the latest mining and supply constraints. However, optimistic predictions of falling prices for NAND (optimistic for consumers, that is) could prove to be erroneous. Apparently, the new cryptocurrency, which saw its whitepaper being published in February 9th and has already led to shortages of high-performance SSDs from China's Jiahe Jinwei.

The cryptocurrency was designed to be mined in SSDs and HDDs, looking to cut on electricity cost from proof of Work (PoW) cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and (still) Ethereum. The intention is for the cryptocurrency to have as broad an appeal as possible, by excluding the need for prohibitive investments in either ASICs (for Bitcoin) or GPUs (for Ethereum and other Dagger/Hashimoto-based calculations). It also leverages that which is most widely available and oftentimes left empty of any workload - storage space. Due to this, it's been reported that Chinese miners are already buying HDDs (4 TB through to 18 TB) and SSDs (mainly NVMe solutions) in bulk. This could prevent technologists from ushering in the current trend of falling storage pricing - if demand becomes as crazy as it has become in the GPU space.